Changing Umbraco Back Office URL

Umbraco comes out-of-the-box with the backoffice URL set to www.example.com/umbraco. We wanted to see if we could change the /umbraco part, so that we could use www.proworks.com/umbraco as a content page.

A quick Google search comes up with this Umbraco forum post (https://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/5050-Can-i-change-admin-panel-URL) which details two valid options for changing the backoffice URL. One of them lets you reuse the /umbraco node and one doesn't. Since we wanted to be able to reuse /umbraco, I went with that option.

As an example, we're going to change the back-office URL to www.example.com/umbrella.

First, go into the web.config file and change the following two lines:

Replace <add key="umbracoReservedPaths" value="~/umbraco,~/install/" /> with <add key="umbracoReservedPaths" value="/umbrella" />

and replace <add key="umbracoPath" value="~/umbraco" /> with <add key="umbracoPath" value="/umbrella" />.

Second, go through the entire solution and search for instances of /umbraco/ in a URL path, and replace them with /umbrella/.

Third, rename the 'Umbraco' directory to 'umbrella'.

That's it!

One issue I ran into was I got an error on the page when I first changed the web config file. I fixed it by adding the tilde and end slash back. After that, it worked whether they were there or not.